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In Defense of Organizational Evolution

A Reply to Reydon and Scholz

Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Organizational ecology applies Darwinian principles of natural selection to understand the evolution of new forms of organizations over time. The idea here is that there are different forms of human organizations, such as different business organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, etc. The growth of new forms of organizations within each of these fields is to be understood in terms of a struggle for existence among organizations with different traits. In a recent article, Reydon and Scholz (2009) argue that this Darwinian view of the evolution of new organizational forms is highly problematic because organizational populations do not exhibit the levels of internal cohesion, isolation, and closure that are necessary for something like Darwinian evolution to occur. In this article, I defend organizational ecology by rebutting the arguments of Reydon and Scholz.

Key Words: organizational ecology • meme theory • Darwinism • natural selection • Hannan • McKelvey

This version was published on September 1, 2009

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 39, No. 3, 463-474 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0048393109334582


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